Acquired by purchase and gift from Charles Booth-Clibborn in memory of Joshua Compston 1997

Reference

P77933

Summary

London is a portfolio of eleven prints made by eleven artists based in London. It was commissioned by Charles Booth-Clibborn and published under his imprint, The Paragon Press, London. The images were printed and editioned at Coriander Studio, London. The portfolio was produced in an edition of sixty-five, the first forty of which are portfolio sets and the remainder are the artists' copies. A further fifteen sets were produced for artists and collaborators. Tate's copy is number five in the edition. The title and colophon pages were designed by Phil Baines using his own typeface. The portfolio is contained in a black buckram-covered wooden case bearing the title in yellow. London is the second group portfolio published by The Paragon Press since its inception in 1986. It was conceived as a portable group exhibition containing work by emerging artists of the same generation. There is no particular common theme. Factors linking some of them are studying art at Goldsmiths College, London in the late 80s (where they were taught by Conceptual artist Michael Craig-Martin, born 1941), working with Jay Jopling (who later opened White Cube Gallery in London) and being exhibited at the Saatchi and Karsten Schubert Galleries in London. Booth-Clibborn had already collected work by a number of the participating artists, few of whom had done any printmaking before embarking on the project. Most chose to work with screenprinting, with the exception of Langlands and Bell, whose image is embossed. Screenprinting is ideally suited to reproducing appropriated and photographic images. Its adoption reflects a characteristic use by young British artists (the group to which most of the London artists belong) of objects or images appropriated from everyday life. Individual prints vary in size, the type of paper used and the orientation of the image.

Marcus Taylor's image, Untitled, is a six-colour screenprint in portrait orientation on 300gsm Somerset Satin paper coated with glossy varnish. It is an image of a giant plug derived from a photograph. Taylor carved the plug in acrylic and it was photographed in black and white and then screenprinted with a blue screen. In the early 1990s Taylor was making sculpture from sheet perspex or acrylic, which he generally sanded on one side to render it semi-opaque. Many works, such as Untitled (Single Chest Freezer) 1992 (Jay Jopling, London) and Untitled (Model for a Diving Pool) 1994 (Tate T06893), are box-like forms echoing the structure of kitchen units and industrial storage containers. Internal elements are only partially visible due to the opacity of the material. Untitled is Taylor's first print.

Further reading:British Art Show 4, exhibition catalogue, South Bank Centre, London 1995, pp.18, 72-3 and 103Contemporary British Art in Print: The Publications of Charles Booth-Clibborn and his Imprint The Paragon Press 1986-95, exhibition catalogue, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh 1995, pp.19 and 46-51, reproduced (colour) p.51Young British Artists IV, exhibition catalogue, Saatchi Gallery, London 1995, pp.???